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Your Quick Tips, 29 January 2007

Penny Postcard Site
The old penny postcards on the Penny Postcard site are interesting, and some folks might get a kick out of old pictures where they, or someone else, used to live.
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Thanks for your great efforts on our behalf,

D.L. Cohagan, M.D.
Bentonville, Arkansas
Â Did Your Ancestor Sell Patent Medicines?
While looking for samples of patent medicine bottle labels, I came across this interesting website. The page header reads Are Any of These Medicine Men or Women Your Relatives? Here you’ll find a surname chart with portraits of each person.
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Actually, the whole subject of patent medicine is quite fascinating. Hope you enjoy this.

Susan Neff, HistorianThe Dr. James Ford Historic Home, Wabash, IndianaWhat’s in an Address?
I noted in your article, “What’s in an Address?” you did not mention one fact. What was the mode of transportation during the time your ancestor lived at an address? I found an address for my great-great-grandfather who was a conductor on a railroad, which is no more. (Detroit, Grand Haven & Milwaukee RR) After checking his home address from a city directory of Detroit, I found he lived just a few blocks from the rail yards of the railroad he worked for. Being in the mid-1800s to the early 1900s and no automobiles or road and street systems as there is now, it made sense. In the horse and buggy days it would have been hard to commute over too far a distance to the work place from where you lived. That is if you had a horse and buggy.

Also I found the same address listed for my great-grandmother, and great-grandfather (before they were married). [Hmm.] Then I remember something my grandmother had told me long ago, that her mother ran a boarding House. Bells and whistles went off like a Fourth of July fireworks display. Yes, it is important to find the addresses of your ancestors. It helps answer a lot of questions.

If you have a suggestion you would like to share with other researchers, send it to: mailto:juliana@ancestry.com . Thanks to all of this week’s contributors!Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the â€œAncestry Weekly Journal,â€ please state so clearly in your message.Â

3 thoughts on “Your Quick Tips, 29 January 2007”

I was struck by the commonality of several details in “What’s in an Address” with my own family history. Would it be possible for Don in California to contact me to see if there are any other points of reference in our research?

It is also important to remember that in the days before automobiles what we think of as a short distance in the country could have been an impossibly long one to our ancestors. I once read in an old letter an apology for not visiting for so long but they had been unable to borrow a horse. The people lived 10 miles apart.